Wednesday, 29 August 2012

Just Mucking Around, Playing with Colour!

At last the waiting is over and the Surface Pattern Design course has begun!

Over the weekend, as the students introduced themselves, I became increasingly nervous. Almost all of them had at least done a degree in Graphic Design and worked in that field and some were even Textiles and Surface Pattern Design graduates! I began to have serious doubts about whether I would be able to keep up with a course that was apparently aimed at people who were already trained and experienced in this field!

But I needn’t have worried – not yet, anyway! The course has started off fairly low-key with this week’s topic, ‘Inspiration’. Anyone who has been following my blog, may have concluded that inspiration is not something I lack – it’s the time to carry out all my ideas properly that I’m short of!

There’s been a fair amount of sketching and taking photos this week, both of which I do anyway.

And by now I’m thinking that it’s probably a good thing that this week hasn’t, so far, been too demanding. There have been so many new people to get to know (nearly 100 on the course at the moment!), a new Pinterest board of ‘Patterns I Like’ to create and finding out how to upload my images to Flickr, for the ‘Group Pool’ took a bit of time!

One thing that I can already say is definitely a Good Thing, is that this course has encouraged me to ‘play’ again!

I must admit it feels a bit strange because I’ve grown so used to working under pressure, to deadlines and with a very clear goal in mind. All very ‘left-brain’!

You can see some of the results of my ‘playtime’ on this Pinterest board, when I discovered a cheap and cheerful 650-piece ‘craft set’ unopened in the cupboard where I keep toys for visiting grandchildren!

And these stripey, postcard-sized experiments were great fun to create!

They’re a bit rough and ready as the tissue paper is difficult to cut in clean lines once it’s been painted. I think two of them are pretty awful, one I quite like and one I’m enthusiastic enough about to use it as the basis of a pattern for some Zazzle products!

I quite like Zazzle - putting my designs on jugs and cushions etc is fun! I don't make a lot of money but some people do. I don't think many of my designs are particularly suitable for the typical Zazzle shopper. And the whole business of thinking up a title, description, keywords etc is time-consuming and can get tedious! But I prefer Zazzle to the greeting card sites that I sell through because it's not just, or even primarily, greeting cards.

It looks like your having fun and just hearing about it makes me think that's what I need to remember to. I think they will make excellent designs and I even like the uneven lines it's so much more real than all the perfect computer digital art.These darn validation words are getting worse and worse. It took 7 tries

Hi Jayne - since I wrote this post, someone has joined the class who is actually designing for a wallpaper company! But I've been relieved to find that there are a few people with even less experience than I have :)